Copse
by Faded Nights
Summary: Separated from her partner and injured in the line of duty, Vicki is 'saved' by a stranger who can’t possibly be what he appears… Can he? PreBlood Ties.
1. Copse

Disclaimer: Blood Ties and all related characters and names are copyright of Tanya Huff and various television networks.

Summary: Separated from her partner and injured in the line of duty, Vicki is saved by a stranger who can't possibly be what he appears… Can he? Pre-Blood Ties.

Just a little mysterious romance for the holiday season.

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**Cops(e)**

Well, she hadn't planned on getting stuck in a situation like this. Of course, she hadn't planned on being on duty tonight at all, but it was Christmas Eve and since she wasn't spending it with Mom, she'd been put on-call for the night. She hadn't thought she'd be called in - after all, it was Christmas Eve. If people were going to get along for one night of the year, couldn't it be tonight? - but she had been. Her and Celluci, much to the ire of his family, she was sure.

"Do you really think there's any chance of finding the murderer in this?" Vicki asked, swinging her arms around in an arc to take in the dark sky, darker shadows, and even darker cloud cover. It was threatening to snow. Not a good sign.

"Follow the trail," Celluci replied. His flashlight traced out a trail of footsteps that led away from the red stained churned up snow in front of them. She let out a choke of laughter.

"And I suppose that's my job?" she asked. Celluci grinned as the beam of his flashlight reached where the footsteps disappeared into a copse of trees.

"I can't fit in there," he said. He sounded smug. She wanted to slug him. "I will, of course, be covering you from outside of the copse." Sureee he would be. No doubt he'd stay in the nice warm car while she was out verifying that their perpetrator had escaped.

"Fine, but remember this: You owe me," Vicki snapped, turning her own flashlight on and taking off toward the copse. There was snow everywhere; on her pants, in her hair, soaking into her boots… It was enough to make anyone testy. It didn't help that she was freezing her butt off.

She brought one hand up to push away an overhanging branch and entered the copse of trees, letting out a curse when, upon releasing the branch, it came back and smacked her across the head, sending a shower of the heavy snow that had been resting on it all down her front. She spat some of it out of her mouth. Celluci definitely owed her for this.

Shaking her head to clear it of her vendetta, well aware that she had a job to do, Vicki focused her flashlight on the footprints in the snow beneath her feet. If there was one good thing about snowy Toronto winters, it was that it made tracking murderers a slight bit easier. Or it at least made it easier to make a guess at the size of the suspect they were searching for. Yeah, that was about it.

She brought the flashlight up and shone it through the copse around her. The trees were thicker than they had appeared from the outside, it was darker inside of the copse than it had been outside of it, and she'd come so deeply into it that she could only see faint shadows of the flashing lights that still had to be whirring around on top of the cars. If anything, those faint shadows that were being cast were more eerie than it would have been in here without them.

She really hoped that whoever had killed the man outside of here wasn't hiding behind one of those trees. There wasn't much room for a tussle and there were plenty of places to hide and strike from if the suspect felt threatened. She should've swallowed her pride and told Mike that he was following her in here - why did she have to be such a hot shot all the time?

There was a noise to her left and though Vicki identified it a moment later as only being the wind moving through the trees and causing them to rustle, it was a moment too late. She spun, moving one foot out to get a better foothold in the deep snow, and her foot plunged into a hole that the snow had hidden. Cursing as pain shot up through the leg, Vicki made to move it and then thought better of it. She'd probably fallen into a rabbit hole and twisted it. What did the rabbit think it was doing, digging a hole here?

There was another noise behind her and Vicki resisted the urge to spin again. That hadn't been the wind, she was sure of it. Tense at the knowledge that there was something behind her that she probably wouldn't be able to see even if she did dare to turn around and look for it, Vicki took a long breath where she stood. As she let it out, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

Reflexes kicking in at the unexpected touch, Vicki's elbow shot out behind her to catch the person in the stomach, and her flashlight flipped around in her hand so that she was using the handle as a baton. Before she could move to hit the person with it though, she found her hand was stopped by a hand firmly on her wrist.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Detective," a man's voice said in her ear. Vicki tensed. The voice was cultured, not at all the type of voice that she would expect from someone hiding in a copse of trees. Not at all the voice that she expected the man - or woman - who had committed the murder outside would have. Of course, that was a terrible generalization. It took all types of people to make the world, after all.

"Let go of me, let me turn around to see you, don't move and then we'll see," Vicki instructed. She felt the hand on her wrist hesitate before it loosened and the presence behind her - and what a strange presence it was - took a step backward. She felt as though a pressure on her shoulders had lessened as she forced herself to turn around and look at the man.

She brought her flashlight up and over him so that she could get an idea of what he looked like, noting with interest the way in which he flinched backward when the beam of light stayed too long near his eyes. He was either naturally incredibly light sensitive or had been out in the dark far too long. If he was her murderer - though from the look of it, he wasn't. He wasn't wearing the heavy boots that had made the footprints in the snow, for one thing - then he was fairly daring, approaching her like this.

"Your name, and your reason for being here," Vicki said in a bland tone. They weren't requests, they were statements that the man was required to answer. She wasn't going to do him the favour of asking them nicely. Not when he'd snuck up behind her in a bush.

"It doesn't matter," the man's voice had a strange rasp to it now and as Vicki stared, she noticed that his eyes had darkened and his teeth looked a little bit shinier than they had been a moment ago. "You haven't seen me." Even as he said it though, he carefully lifted her and then put her down before she could blink.

When she finally did blink though, her eyes readjusted to see Mike leaning against the front of one of the cars, talking to someone. She was at the edge of the copse again. What the _hell_ had just happened?

Carefully, wary of her injured ankle, Vicki spun and shone her flashlight back into the copse. There had been a man. Or, she thought that he was a man. He had certainly looked, sounded and - as reluctant as she was to admit the observation - smelled like a man. She turned back to face Celluci, who was crossing the snow covered lawn to reach her.

"Well?" she heard him ask. Her mind wasn't fully on Mike though, as terrible as it probably was for their outside-of-work relationship. Even as she responded to his query, telling him that everything was normal in the copse, that she hadn't found anyone and that she_could_ walk and didn't need his help getting to the car, no matter how much she was limping, her mind was elsewhere. It was stuck on the man that had somehow taken her from the middle of the copse to where she had come in before she could blink an eye.

It was stuck on the man that had whispered, "Merry Christmas, may we meet again," in her ear as he put her down. And most of all, it was on the place on her forehead where she could still feel the pressure of his lips as he had given her a gentle kiss.

"It's been a weird night, Mike. Are we done here?"

Celluci raised an eyebrow at her but quickly turned his head to scan the scene before he nodded. "Sure, Vicki." He was used to her odd behaviour, she was used to his. It had to come from being a homicide cop. Had there really been a man in those trees?

_End_

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Oh. Wow. That didn't turn out how I wanted it to. Oh well… I like the title though. It amuses me. 


	2. Vamped

_Because it was requested and I had nothing better to do, here's a brief extension of "Cops(e)" from Henry's perspective. Though I still want to rework the original ending…_

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**Vamped**

The whirring sound of sirens held a piercing tone that couldn't quite be blocked out, even with the windows and doors of his car sealed tightly shut. He allowed his mind to wander as he pulled around the corner and reached another red light - what did sirens sound like to normal human ears? He had no doubt that they were annoying but they couldn't possibly be as annoying to mortals as they were to him. Mortal ears were sensitive - well, somewhat - but they weren't _that_ sensitive.

He inched the car forward and through the intersection, his eyes catching sight of flashing lights just past the next building. In spite of himself, he was curious - and the building the lights were located next to was his destination anyway.

Pulling the car into the building's parking lot, Henry shut off the engine and clamoured from the car. The instant he opened the door, the scent of blood - freshly spilled blood - assaulted his sense. His head spun to face the flashing police lights and the ear assaulting sirens and his nostrils flared. Murder, then. It was the only explanation for a scent that strong. Violently committed murder.

His sense spread out beyond the lifeless body of the victim to feel the bodies that were moving around the scene as he approached. There were a lot of people around but then, it was a murder scene and a lot of people were expected to be seen around murder scenes. There was always too much motion around murders. Too many people; too many busy-bodies who had nothing to do with anything that was happening. Too many people who had been desensitised to death and who didn't realise that they could easily be next.

From his spot close to the building and far away from the police line tape, Henry could see all that was going on at the scene. The scent of blood was still heavy in the air, though he could see that the body itself had been taken away. Where the murder had been committed, or at least, where the body had fallen, the snow was crimson and brown, churned by too many feet so that it had almost been cleared to the dead ground below the layer of fluffy white.

There were two people talking - more arguing, really - in front of one of the cars on the scene. He squinted through the flashing red and blue lights as the beacon inside the plastic casing atop the car the man and woman were near turned toward him. She clearly didn't want to do something - he could tell as much from here, though there was so much noise that he couldn't make out their conversation from the rest of the conversations around him.

The woman began heading for the copse a moment later and Henry frowned as he watched her. The stance she had adopted was intriguing. It was one that he'd seen many times - the self-assured body language that usually spoke more strongly of arrogance and the need to prove something than of experience. It was unusual on a woman and, if he moved to the side just so… Her face told him that the posture came from experience and not from arrogance. Well, not from pure arrogance, though there was definitely arrogance there. How interesting.

Henry allowed his awareness of the life on the scene to extend to the copse as the young woman entered into it. A few moments later, he was inside of the copse itself, the leaves of the trees behind him rustling as though a wind had blown through them instead of a person. There was something not right about a presence in here. Something vaguely… Untrustworthy. It wasn't a sense that he normally got from humans, though it was something that he recognised in himself.

"Leave," he whispered under his breath, his eyes tracing the woman's progress through the trees. She was relying on the flashlight in her hand to guide her through the trees - it was amazing how dependant humanity was on objects. He couldn't remember having ever been so dependant on something that wasn't his own body and wit. Something about this age had taken away from the human race, to make people more reliable on material things than themselves. Another interesting thing that he hadn't bothered to observe before.

The presence that he had spoken to had fled when it - he - had realised that someone knew that he was there. It probably made things more difficult for the police but at least one of their number wouldn't be injured… Much.

Henry rolled his eyes as he turned back to look at the detective. She'd fallen into a rabbit hole. How incredibly typical of a modern city person, to not realise the secrets that a heavy snowfall could hide. Still, there was something appealing about the way she stood there, stock still as though she had heard him enter the trees.

Henry realised with a start that she had. She had noticed the wind blowing through the trees, and had either not realised that it was the wind, or she was just jumpy enough that she couldn't dismiss it as being something natural. He moved again, making just enough noise to let the woman know that she wasn't alone. He needed to get a closer look at this strange woman.

Feeling rather bold, though Henry knew that it was stupid because she was likely to think that he was the perpetrator that she was looking for, he took a step forward and put a hand on her shoulder. He hadn't expected the speed in which the woman's reflexes had kicked in though, and grunted, shooting his hand out to catch her wrist even as he realised that she had hit him directly in the solar plexus with her elbow.

_'Note to self; do not tangle with Metro P.D. in the future_.' Aloud though, he said softly, "I'm not going to hurt you, Detective."

He was pretty sure that she didn't believe him - he wouldn't have believed him either, had he been in her place - and so, after a moment's hesitation in which he wondered if it was the wisest thing to do, consented when she ordered him to release her and step back. He frowned at the way in which she moved when she turned to face him. He was sure that she'd injured herself when she'd fallen into the rabbit hole, but a moment later he was cringing as her flashlight lingered too long close to his eyes. Cursed technology.

"Your name and your reason for being here," the woman ordered. She had a strong presence - it was amazing - but he could tell that coming here had been one of the stupidest things he'd done in the past decade or so, and he quickly tried to fix it.

It was a shame her will was so strong that she didn't fall victim to his hypnosis.

Before he knew what he was doing, Henry had lifted the woman around the waist and rushed to the edge of the copse with her. It wouldn't do to leave a lady trying to wade through the snow with a hurt ankle after all. Then, impulsively, he kissed her softly on the forehead.

"Merry Christmas, may we meet again," he whispered, lips as close to her shell of her ear as they could be without touching them. He could practically hear her mind reeling as it tried to catch up with what it had just seen, and he knew that she would be pushing the incident away as exhaustion or something like it. Most adult minds couldn't comprehend the reality of the existence of vampires. They were too set in their own, close-minded idea of 'reality.'

It was almost a shame, Henry mused as he darted back to the building that had been his original destination, pausing only to watch as the woman got into the car with the man he assumed was her partner, and they began to prepare to drive off. He would be quite interested in seeing what hid behind such a strong will.

_End. Really._

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Much more satisfied with this one. Enjoy! 


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